South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s Bazaar Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape. “Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class, and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. “California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here we not only see Didion’s signature irony and imagination in play, we’re also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process.

Mostly interesting because it's clear that even in her notebooks Joanne Didion is an exceptional writer. But otherwise, not sure why this was published.

Notater fra Sørstatene en måned på 70-tallet og flere tilfeldigheter om California. Jeg nyter slike tekster, men det er likevel ikke mer enn fragmenter.

Short vignettes of Didion's travels through Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama in 1970. Perfection.

I liked it! Reading about the South is always a little fascinating. The regionality of this country is at times hard to reconcile, especially today with this vague monoculture and supposed shrunken world. I did not grow up in The South, but I grew up in a place that was quite insistent it was Southern, and would you please remember that, everything in their character insisted.

A few times in the Southern notes, Didion talks about free flag decals. Impossible not to think of Prine's Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore an incredible song as applicable in the late 60's as it was in 2002 and 2025. I say 2002 because I remember after 9/11 and the years following when the local newspaper would come with full page inserts: one side an American flag, the other at times a tearful eagle. These were all over the place. You couldn't pass a busted up mobile home or hole-roofed house without seeing them in the windows.

So, while Didion is trekking around the South in the 60's, it sure does feel like the Southern region of the state I grew up in. Similar people, maybe with some proclivities a little dampened. Same fondness for the high school gymnasium and the one restaurant in town. There is a lot that I see familiar, anyway.

The short section of Western notes is quite different. I don't relate to the San Francisco or Sacramento of it all, though it is lovely writing.

Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

Southern